The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  When he thought he had exhausted that avenue, he tried a new line. ‘What’s it like working in Africa? Is it anything like it is here?’

  ‘In some ways, I suppose it’s much the same. In others, it’s completely different.’

  ‘In what way is it different?’ Nathan was not just being polite. He really wanted to know.

  ‘Everything is much more organised here.’

  ‘Organised? How?’

  ‘Well, medical treatment, for instance. In the year before I left, our domestic worker and two of my office staff died of Aids.’

  ‘Medical treatment is not that well organised here. And we do have Aids deaths.’

  ‘Three out of sixty people in a few years?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not like that.’

  Nathan is one of those people who likes to sit round the dinner table after you have finished eating. The chairs were uncomfortable, but he did not seem to notice. He wanted to know what the standard of living was like in Africa, whether we had American cars, what sort of food Africans ate and if there was a Jewish community in Johannesburg.

  I think I tired of his questions before he tired of my answers. We had to work the next morning, so before ten I was on my way home, thinking about my employees who had died of Aids. Of the two who had worked for my company, one was a salesperson and the other a gardener. Both had gone through a pattern of increased absenteeism, then stopped coming to work altogether. There had been a few visits from family members to collect money owing to the deceased, and after that, it was over.

  The third had been our domestic worker. Lerato had been in my private employ and had come into my home every day, five days a week. She was a small, stout woman who took her three children to a nearby school every morning before coming to work. The school was a better one than she could afford and there seemed to be no help from the children’s father, but she was determined that they were going to have a better life than she had.

  With so much contact, I got to know her better than the other two. There were also occasions when I met the children, a girl of twelve and twins of nine, a boy and a girl. Like other Aids sufferers, her strength started to wane and she first stayed away occasionally, then perhaps once a week, and after that, more often. When she did come to work, she looked weak and spent much of the day sitting down. And like the others, she only had herself tested after it was too late to do much about it.

  The day she came to tell me that she had tested positive was also the last time she came to work. Within a week she was dead.

  The church where the funeral was held was in Alexandra township, a sprawling mixture of old, dilapidated houses, tiny government-subsidised matchbox cottages, small apartments, and single rooms that were little more than lean-tos against crumbling brick walls. There were few trees or gardens. On the pavements, business of every imaginable kind was being conducted. We found the church in a road thronged with the traffic of people attending other funerals being held that day. Every two hours, from ten that morning till six in the evening, a new funeral was scheduled in the church. Afterwards Lerato’s sister told me that the situation was much the same in other churches in the township. The frightful disease that had killed Lerato was taking its toll on the community.

  The funeral was a real African affair with almost everyone who was related to her or had ever spoken to her having their say to a crowd that packed the church and spilled out into the yard. A great many also seized the opportunity to sing solos about her passing and how much they missed her, something to which no one objected and for which the family seemed grateful. Sometimes members of the congregation joined in, harmonising naturally with the soloist. Among the singers was Lerato’s eldest daughter. She sang a gentle African song in a sweet, clear voice that my wife, Joan, commented on afterwards. All the women were dressed in black, some of the young ones in creations that had not come cheap and had been designed to display the full African bosoms of the wearers.

  I too was pressed into speaking. I had barely started when, to my surprise, an interpreter started up, following close behind me. I slowed down after that, pausing after every sentence to let the interpreter have his say. Joan and I had already decided that we would pay for the children’s education, but when I told that to the congregation, there was a sound of genuine surprise, followed by a round of applause.

  I had expected the coffin to be at the head of the church, but it was in the centre with members of the congregation all around it. It was more ornate than I expected, but it looked too small to me. I could not imagine that all of Lerato, her body, her whole life, could now be contained in that little box.

  The church service was to be followed by another at the graveside and an all-night vigil in the family apartment, the entire process taking some twenty-four hours. Africans know how to mourn the passing of their loved ones. We left after the service in the church, so we never discovered how so many people were going to fit into an apartment as small as hers.

  The next week we had a meeting with the children, their aunt, grandmother and a woman from the school administration. The two younger children, sitting on the edge of a settee between the women, seemed stunned into silence by their mother’s death. The older one, sitting stiffly erect on a straight-backed chair, gave us quick, anxious smiles. Aunt and grandmother looked relieved at the thought of a little help coming their way, while the woman from the school kept telling us how kind we were.

  I had expected the meeting to be a very awkward affair, but the only self-conscious ones present were Joan and I. We soon got over it and settled down to discussing what we were going to pay and what mechanism we would use to hand over the money.

  It was just six months later that we had to have a new meeting. It was held at our house from which some of the furniture had already been moved. This time the kids were not present. Lerato’s mother came with the children’s aunt. The old lady’s English was poor and she said little. Joan spoke to the aunt. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid we are going to have to change our arrangement.’

  The look that came over the woman’s face suggested what she was thinking. Here we go again, promises that mean nothing disappearing into smoke so soon. She had already glanced round the room, her eyes widening slightly. ‘You are in trouble?’

  Joan knew that she was talking about money trouble. ‘No, not that sort of trouble,’ she said. ‘We are moving overseas.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘We are not all going to the same country.’

  ‘I’m sorry—’ Her regret was real, but the question left hanging was – so what about the children’s education?

  ‘We will do what we promised,’ Joan said. ‘But the arrangements will have to be different.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ the children’s aunt said, looking from Joan to me and back to Joan again.

  ‘Thank you,’ the older woman echoed.

  The two women studied us as if trying to understand what had gone wrong. Under their gaze, I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. I saw the same sort of movement from Joan. In the eyes of the two women, we were nice people who were trying to help raise Lerato’s children. We were not the sort of people who should be having this sort of problem. ‘Your little boy?’ the aunt asked eventually.

  ‘He’s coming with me,’ Joan said.

  twenty-two

  Nathan was born in 1965 and I think he always felt that he had missed out on what he considered to be the great moments in history. His parents had told him about their personal involvement in World War II, and how they had lost family members in the holocaust. Older relatives of his generation had told him about protests against the Vietnam War. One of his uncles had fought in Vietnam, but had not wanted to tell the young Nathan about it.

  He seemed to feel that all the great social and even the great technological changes had taken place in the lifetimes of other people. ‘You’re lucky,’ he told me once. ‘You’ve lived through momentous times. What can I
say I did? I had a small business. I worked for a living, didn’t take much leave, paid my taxes, tried to be fair to the few people who worked for me. That’s it, not much to tell your grandchildren, nothing very dramatic about it. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

  It depended on your point of view, I thought. A discussion on the subject was not something I needed though. It seemed to me that the times Nathan had lived through were momentous enough. You, Nathan, can thank God you never had the opportunity to become a hero, I thought. It does not always work out well and few become heroes. It is certainly not romantic territory.

  A few months after I started working for him, an apparently famous cantor from Israel arrived in the city to hold a concert of songs from the Hebrew tradition and the Yiddish theatre. I invited Nathan and Rochelle. The desktop artist whose sandwiches I had enjoyed at the beach also agreed to come.

  We left work early and drove in my car. On the way, Rochelle confided in me that she was ashamed to say that she did not know this music at all. ‘But how do you know it, Chris?’ she asked. ‘You’re not Jewish.’

  ‘There’s a lot of music that I love,’ I said. ‘I thought you might appreciate this.’

  The famous cantor had a fine, light tenor voice and he sang some lovely songs. His rendering of ‘Oy Dortn Dortn’ had some of the older ladies in the audience weeping. Afterwards, we stopped for something to eat. Both Nathan and Rochelle said that they had enjoyed the concert very much. My desktop artist looked from one of us to the other and decided to go with the majority. ‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘It was very nice.’

  I took her home after dropping off Nathan and Rochelle. I had also found the concert satisfying and sex with the artist was altogether pleasant, if not especially inspiring. I settled down for the night, but at about three in the morning she woke me. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘do you always snore like that?’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘I heard nothing. I was unconscious.’

  Driving home through the empty streets so that she could get some sleep, I thought about what Nathan had said about living in momentous times. Since the Portuguese Mozambicans started flooding into Durban back in 1974, I seemed always to be at the centre of such times.

  The rebellion of the black pupils against being taught in Afrikaans was another. After that the country always seemed to be at war with itself.

  But there were also private moments that only those involved would remember. For me, one such moment came after the events in Mozambique and the start of the schools rebellion.

  By that time Abraham had to make regular trips to Johannesburg. What the purpose was, I never discovered. As far as I could see, they did him no good. I had since heard a name for what Abraham had. It was muscular dystrophy, Uncle Stefan said. On one occasion when he had to go to Johannesburg, neither Uncle Stefan nor Auntie Virginia could make the trip, so my father agreed to put in for two days’ leave and take Abraham. I pleaded until I was also allowed to go. ‘Let him come, what’s a couple of days off school?’ my father said to Mama.

  It was not like him to be so lenient. I felt like cheering, but I knew better than to show enthusiasm for being off school. I tried to do no more than smile when Mama agreed. ‘Get that self-satisfied look off your face, Chrissie,’ Mama told me, but she let me go.

  We drove up one morning, setting out long before sunrise, for Abraham to see the specialist in the afternoon. My first view of Johannesburg, across the flat country to the south-east of the city, was of a distant skyline. It rose up from the flat ground ahead of us like something magical.

  I had heard so much about the city that had been built on gold. Much of what I had heard was conflicting. Uncle Gawie said it was a modern Sodom and Gomorrah where people partook of unspeakable wickedness. My father said that it was a nest of liberalism, and if the country were left to the people of Johannesburg, the white race would soon be extinct. Uncle Stefan told me it was a big town where people made big money. Our social studies teacher said that Johannesburg was our New York, a busy city with plenty of opportunities. He agreed with Uncle Stefan, saying that he knew people who had got rich there in just a few years. When I asked him why he had not moved to Johannesburg himself to get rich, he had said that unfortunately the Department of Education had stationed him in Durban. As he was a dedicated teacher and also had a study loan to pay off, there was nothing he could do. Otherwise he would have been on the first train to Johannesburg.

  I sat with my face almost touching the window as my father negotiated our way through the city’s traffic. To me, the streets of Johannesburg were busier than those of Durban, the buildings taller, the cars newer and more expensive, the people better dressed and everything moved faster. The people of Johannesburg all had important things to do that made them lots of money. I loved it.

  When my father went into the surgery with Abraham, leaving me to wait in the antechamber, I asked the receptionist to tell him that I would be downstairs at the car. I was not going to wait inside while Johannesburg rushed by outside.

  He had been lucky to find parking right outside the medical centre and I took up my position next to the car to observe the Johannesburgers at first hand. Thinking back to that day, I do not suppose that the foot and road traffic passing the building was that much different to what it was like in Durban, but to me it was much more exciting. What did it take, I wondered, to be able to live and work in our New York? How did you qualify?

  An older white man wearing a dark suit that was obviously expensive, his grey hair carefully trimmed, stepped out of a chauffeur-driven Bentley. He walked right past me towards the building where Abraham was being treated. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ I said to him in English. I had to make contact with Johannesburg somehow.

  He stopped and seemed to notice me for the first time. Looking at me with a puzzled expression, he answered. ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ I tried again.

  He looked surprised, but nodded. ‘Good afternoon to you too,’ he said and went on his way into the building.

  Watching him go, I felt exhilarated. Not only had I spoken to someone from Johannesburg, but a rich old man too. I wondered what position he held. Maybe he owned a gold mine.

  A knot of black men in overalls came past, talking in one of their languages. There was no point in trying to speak to them, but I did speak to a young man in jeans and a T-shirt who looked as if he would have been at home in Greenwood Park. He too seemed surprised at my interest. When I asked him if he had ever been in Greenwood Park, he asked, ‘Where?’

  After that I spoke to a nurse who was waiting on the pavement for a lift, a hobo who tried to borrow money from me and a uniformed meter maid checking the parking meters to see if anyone had been parking too long. She confided in me that she was wanting to move to the coast and was hoping to get a job in Durban.

  Then there was a black boy, about my age, who told me in broken English that he had come from the Venda homeland and wanted to learn to be a waiter. ‘Waiters get tips,’ he said. He just needed someone to teach him how to be one.

  By the time my father and Abraham came back, I felt that I was practically an expert on the people of Johannesburg. It seemed to me that I was already one of them. That night we had a dinner of fried chicken bought at a fast-food outlet and slept in a furnished flat. My suggestion that we go for a walk to see more of Johannesburg was turned down by my father. ‘Abraham is not well,’ he said. I asked if I could go alone, but that suggestion too was refused. ‘Not in this place,’ he told me. ‘And we have to leave early.’

  He was not just talking. We set out for home at about three the next morning. I now studied the empty night-time streets the same way I had studied everything when we arrived, seeing mysteries in every shadow. If I could have, I would rather have walked the route to drink it all in. ‘Africa’s New York,’ I whispered to the dark Johannesburg streets. ‘I will come back. You’ll see me here again. I promise you that.’

  Of the two possi
ble routes back into Natal, my father always favoured the slower one. There was less traffic and, according to him, that made up for the extra bends and the few extra kilometres. Of course, at this time of the morning there was very little traffic anyway. My father was alone in the front of the car, while Abraham and I slept on the back seat. A little before the halfway mark of our journey, the road skirted the industrial town of Newcastle. In momentary glimpses through layers of sleep, I was aware of murky predawn light filtering through a heavy mist. The smog from the coal mines that was common in the area was hanging low on the ground.

  I felt the car slowing, stopping briefly, then moving again, and once again stopping. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I sat up to see the movement of many people in the grey semidarkness outside. As I watched, the picture became clearer. A line of people was passing close to the car, shuffling along the verge of the road. Ahead of us the lights of a police vehicle were flashing white and red. Behind us other cars had also come to a standstill. I saw people trudging slowly along the roadside in an irregular line, swollen to six or seven deep in places and punctuated by gaps in other places, until they merged with the smog and were lost to sight. Ahead of us, as they came within range of the revolving lights, a chain of humanity appeared out of the gloom next to the police vehicle.

  I looked down at Abraham, but he was still asleep. The figure of a policeman drew nearer and knocked on the window on my father’s side. He was a young white man, probably in his early twenties. ‘All right, sir. You can move on,’ he said in English.

  Most policemen spoke Afrikaans and that was how my father answered him. ‘Dankie, konstabel.’